Heehaw — Amazing Storytelling from Edinburgh and the World
Toby Trueman is the Creative Director at Heehaw, which recently won the Drum’s ‘Create Britain Award’, the first of its kind. We speak to Toby about staying on top of the production process, trust, and Heehaw’s feature film projects.
Welcome to the Movidiam podcast. Today, we’ve got Toby Trueman from Heehaw Productions based out of Edinburgh. Toby, welcome to the Movidiam podcast and it’s very exciting to be here just after you’ve had such a fantastic win at the Drum Awards in London.
Thank you very much. Nice to speak to you.
So tell us a little bit about that project and how it manifests itself and why it was received so well.
Well, the Drum wanted to run a project to really advertise the UK as a sort of creative hub that was still open for business in the wake of the Brexit vote. So they came up with an idea for a project where agencies and production companies could sort of create a little video that they could then pin on a map of the UK that would enable anyone looking to see that we’re really shouting about what we’re able to do.
We decided to tackle this head on, and do one about one of our favorite subjects which is of course the city where we’re based, which is Edinburgh. So we set the task to the guys and yeah, they turned it around in a few days.
Sure. Fantastic, and look at your showreel. There are a few shots of Edinburgh in that, in your profile there. So you can just about guess that you’re based there.
We are, yes. We’ve always been based here. Founded in 2000, but we’ve never left the area where we are in the town.
Tell us a bit about your history as a filmmaker. Did you start off before Heehaw as a freelance filmmaker, or what was the journey?
I was. I mean I originally studied photography as well as film, left university and moved into post production. So I started as a freelance editor mainly, but then the 2008 economic crash happened and that didn’t really help me very much. But then I managed to get a job in Heehaw in 2009 and have been working there ever since. So now it’s myself and Mally that run the company there.
Fantastic, and tools like Movidiam, you must see quite a lot of these things sort of coming to the marketplace.
But we live in a world which is changing very rapidly because of technology. We’ve seen a lot of this transition and change in the hardware that filmmakers, DOPs, directors, and editors have used over the last five or ten years. But really the software offering that enables people to streamline the vast amount of things that they need to do on any one production — is that absolutely needed by a team like yours which has got lots of moving parts? And how might it help?
Well the online thing, certainly with the work that you guys are doing, I think it’s quite an exciting time for that. I’m quite keen to see where that can go, how we can grow a network, what opportunities are there to be made, how we can reach out to agencies online through a portal like Movidiam and really sort of come together in other ways.
You know, sometimes it’s a bit difficult to get in touch with some people occasionally, and certainly outside of the local area. So it will be nice to see where that can go. But it seems to be changing over time.
I think traditionally filmmaking is about working with trusted people who can execute, building trust and integrity on the internet, which some people think is sort of a commoditized and a cheap domain to find things inexpensively. Well, a proposition like Movidiam is very much the antithesis of that. It’s a platform which is highly professional people coming together, using software programs that have been written to streamline the production process. So it’s stuff that might have been done on paper or through a telephone call, consolidated into one place for production capabilities and purpose.
Yeah, I think you’re right there. I think the trust is a really key element here. We’re quite dedicated to our clients. We have our own roster of clients, and we just started working a little bit with agencies and we’d love to pursue that more. But we actually have a big base of our own clients and that’s all built on trust.
Our first client from 2000 is still our client today. We did a video for them just this year. That trust needs to be there so that person at the other end if they got a video project that needs done, they can automatically come to us knowing we’ll take the problem out of their hands and give the something decent at the end of the day. It’s just like how you get that across on an online platform with people you have never met before and that you are starting to build those relationships. That’s the key.
Yes, I guess it is. It starts with the connections so people can see all the professionals you’ve worked with: having a full portfolio of work, having a profile piece or a showreel such as yours, which has got so much expertise sort of exuding from it.
You can start to build a picture of the team behind it. People were finding more and more coming to the network who might not have an experience of making a film in the past and don’t know the processes, so being able to take them on that journey quickly builds trust by the time you’re shooting, and certainly editing a piece together.
I think that’s right. We’ve got quite a lot of experience of people that have never made a video before. Obviously it does happen quite a lot. I think you’re right about having that portfolio, it makes it a lot easier. We have our business model a little maybe different from other production companies in that we try and keep it all in-house.
We’ve got quite a team that’s skilled in quite a few different areas, whether that be 2D motion graphics, 3D motion graphics, animation, illustration. And it’s editing, coloring, such and so forth, so we find that encouraging for clients when they look at the portfolio and go “all that work comes from within Heehaw”. I think having the portfolio is always a cornerstone.
It’s two things really, isn’t it? It’s the trust on the client side of the delivery and Heehaw always execute, they never let down. They do what they say they’re going to do. But also I think as networks get bigger, it’s the trust on the supply side, as well.
For example we’ve got this fantastic visual effects artist in Sao Paolo. He’s very passionate about Edinburgh, he wants to work on an animation which is animating a product or a service in that, or some sort of point of interest which is mutual ground. I think these ideas of in-house and out-house are sort of merging, are they not?
They are, you’re absolutely right. There’s an animation on our portfolio there which we did for Scotland’s Innovation Centres, and that was illustrated by a lass that lives in Italy. We never met in person, but we’ve collaborated on a few projects with her. So it all depends on what style we need, if we can’t do it in-house, or it’s a different look. That’s when you go to your network, but we do value that network of freelancers. Especially when it comes to production, of course. Once we do film ourselves, we’ve got a roster of pretty talented DOPs that we call on for a lot of our work.
Sure. I think as clients, say for example you’re working for a fashion brand and there’s seasonal change, and one look is not appropriate for winter that’s appropriate for summer or autumn.
What I found is that artists sort of, they skew towards an area or a style that interests them, therefore they rehearse and practice and work out that style. And it’s actually interesting, isn’t it, to place the team of best fit by having access to the whole network?
Yeah, you’re exactly right. I mean, we do that internally as well, let’s start with our roster freelancers. Going back to that original example, if you look at that video, she does have a very specific style of animation, and that might not be a great fit for another project where things need to be a little bit different. But that’s part of the fun of it, isn’t it?
It’s proposing an idea and proposing who’s going to do it and how it’s going to work, and then taking the best route for the client and ultimately the audience of course.
Are you being asked to do a different range of projects as we see the distribution changing?
So you know, originally there was commercials and television and big expensive production budgets, you may have worked on some of those as well. But the smaller the clients, different brands wanting for different channels: YouTube, online, perhaps even a Snapchat commercial, dare I say it.
Yes it’s a huge range of stuff that we’re doing just over the smallest scale. Over the olympics we were doing ten seconds stop motion adds for social media, they are just going out on Twitter during the olympics for a betting website. Then you got fifteen seconds looping videos that being used as video wallpapers, no audio in those.
Then obviously you got different things coming in at the social media front where you now got a lot of people who aren’t even listening to the audio on videos anymore. They’re just sort of scrolling through their feed and come across it. So adapting your promo to be more removed from audio content such as interviews, and being much more graphical, much more visual and really punchy 60 seconds.
Story without audio.
Yeah, exactly.
That’s kind of a reversion back to the historic cinema of the early days.
I know. For cinephiles like us — it makes me cry a little inside. But it also means that it’s an exciting challenge and that you get much more visual with what you are doing. Not everyone wants that of course. You do still have your two minute promos which are interview based. It’s really about finding the right story for the right audience on the right platform.
Sure. We were speaking to Steve Davis of the APA, Advertising Producers Association, a few moments ago. He really harks back to the story being the absolutely fundamental thing behind any film, and that manifests itself in the script, and the responsibility of a production company is to manifest from paper into the final product, and that’s the remarkable thing that production company fit for the future can do with unique access and networks to do them.
That’s exactly it. It’s all about story. That’s how you tell that story, depending on what you’re working with and who you’re working with. The story could be quite dry but there’s always an emotional way that you can portray that to the audience, because videos these days seem to have such a broad audience base now.
So you really have to sort of start with that lowest common denominator, and make the subject in the story as easy to understand as possible so that you can tell it in the shortest amount of time. Because usually you find with audiences these days that the attention spans are dropping all the time. How do you tell the story as succinctly and as best as possible?
Sure, so you’ve done a lot of branded content, you’ve worked a lot with business as you’ve got a fantastic client roster yourself, you’re looking to work more with agencies perhaps in the region or in urban centers such as London and New York. But you’ve also got this feature film journey just about to start. Tell us about that.
That’s right. Well we got a little original content, the Heehaw Films side to what we do, and last year we released our first feature film. It’s a feature documentary on the Haçienda nightclub in Manchester called ‘Do You Own the Dancefloor?’, about what happened when they shut the club and sold off the parts at auction. It tracks down where those parts are today and interviews the people behind it all. That was a co-production with a company called Shiny Brick Films in Manchester, and we released that — when was the festival circuit — last year? It did quite well, quite a few sold out shows in Manchester and now we are looking into this interest in various regions and where that’s going to go next. We are hoping it might end up on Netflix or something similar.
Then this year we started the next project which is called ‘The African Witchfinder’. It’s a different film about the links between witchcraft and mental health in sub-Saharan Africa. We were out filming in Namibia for three weeks at the start of the year, and will probably have to go back next year. We start post on that already, so there’s space on that one.
I’m no expert, but it sounds like a complex subject matter.
It is. It’s quite eye opening. It kicked off when we heard through Twitter this story of a white pastor called Berrie. He visited this town at the north end of the country where there’s a Himba community. There, there was a lady who was chained to a post inside a mud hut, and Berrie found out that she’d been chained there for over 25 years.
She was accused of witchcraft, but actually she just had dementia. So Berrie, who operates and runs a dementia care home, he frees her and starts this campaign for the freedom of the mentally ill, which otherwise being so overpressed, just by the the belief system down there.
It’s fairly forlorn.
Very eye opening and what a remarkable story to uncover and actually document.
It was, yeah, it was. The thing was that everybody was so lovely and warm when we went down there. We went to often the most the remote areas meeting some of these remote tribal people, and they were all really warm and welcoming. It’s just a cultural thing, it’s a cultural belief.
It’s an incredible story watching Barry deal with all of this and try and fight for just an awareness, really. So yeah, we’ll see what happens with that one.
It’s incredibly powerful actually that we’ve gone through the world of two, three, four-second branded content ads to very important subject matter, almost scared of the human rights issue, and it’s all in the context that we work in, which is film. The medium that we work which is film.
I mean that’s it. Isn’t it? That’s the beauty really of the format. It’s, more and more stories are being told through video. The text is being swept from websites and replaced with video streams; posters are being ripped from walls and replaced with video screens.
It’s gonna get more and more. You’re going to see it more and more. You going to see that film storage fits a snap, a ten seconds snap. In fact, I believe that someone released a feature film on Snapchat recently. I think they released sections of it in ten second verse. But yeah, from those little ten seconds films all the way up to 90 minutes it’s a medium that’s going to get more powerful and stronger.
Well it’s accessible, isn’t it, by whoever you are, wherever you are. I think that’s one of the great powers. We’re very well placed in Movidiam, we’re seeing the rapid growth of the network of filmmakers and creators and games production companies, all coming onto the platform to find efficiencies on their timeline tool or with the video revision tool or just the ability to kind of share assets and documents regarding the production inside the communication channel.
Is implementing Movidiam something that might be of interest to your business at Heehaw?
Absolutely. I’ve been watching Movidiam with an eye since you guys first came online. It’s been interesting to see it grow, and see the types of people that are getting involved, the kind of work that they’re promoting and now, like you say, how the collaboration process works and all those production management tools.
I think it’s great. Really looking forward to seeing how we can really utilize this going forward.
It’s a journey isn’t it? It’s a journey of discovery both of finding new people to collaborate with, but also putting down the trusted methods that you already used to get a production done, and at the standard you do, a remarkable production done. It’s a little symbiotic addition.
Absolutely, The beautiful thing about Movidiam, going back to that trust element, we are firm believers that the people will buy from and collaborate with other people. You have to have that one-to-one nature there. I think that trust is super important, and I think Movidiam is a really good way of facilitating that in the digital space.
I think for us as well it was interesting. We came from the world of filmmaking, and we produced a lot of films in a production company previously. We did suffer some pain points and that’s what gave us a few ideas about how to start a little community so we could find teams, Now we see several thousand people a month registering with the platform.
It’s very inspiring to hear their feedback and your feedback as well, because that really helps make something which collectively is better for everyone.
Yeah, exactly if this can become the one place, if it becomes just another part of the production process to find out what’s happening on Movidiam; or latest update from someone on Movidiam who want to connect that got an idea for a video. If it just becomes part of the process that would be, I’m sure that’s the ultimate goal for both of us.
We’ve got to keep going. We got a bit of work to do.
It’s on track, it’s on track.
Toby, fantastic to have you on the Movidiam podcast and congrats again for your Create Britain Award, which was the first of its kind.
Thanks very much. No problem, it’s a pleasure speaking with you. Look forward to seeing what’s next for Movidiam.
Find Toby Trueman and Heehaw online:
Movidiam: Toby Trueman, Heehaw
Website:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/weareheehaw
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/weareheehaw
